While some were surprised to see the PopCap crew trying out a different genre, the company itself doesn't "see Bookworm Adventures as a departure from our core mission at all, really." He says they've "always been more interested in trying out different things, [rather] than in just milking a formula to death. We've only done one sequel so far, after all [Bejeweled 2], where we could have probably been pumping out Zuma 5 by now. Our earlier shoot-em-up game, Heavy Weapon, is certainly more of a 'serious' game than BAD, I think, in that it's definitely aimed more at a traditional audience for violent games."
Right around the time of the interview, I'd noticed PopCap games popping up on Steam - one of the homes for that traditional audience for violent games. He says they'd worked with "lots of portals and publishers, like Real Arcade, MSN Games, Yahoo Games, Shockwave and so on, so doing something with Steam seemed like a logical extension." He adds, "The interesting thing here is seeing the overlap between supposedly hardcore gamers - the Half-Life 2 crowd - and the 'casual' space, which you're also seeing on Xbox Live Arcade, where you have people who bought a $400 game system using it to play Bejeweled or Zuma." For all that's made of the hardcore-casual divide, he thinks "there are fewer differences between these two crowds than people think. They've both just gotten used to different channels for getting their games. If you're a hardcore console gamer, well, until recently, there simply was no way you could find even a light puzzle game for your system."
Something else PopCap is trying is an open-source toolkit, offered freely as part of the PopCap Developer Program, intended to make it easier for aspiring developers to make games. I asked him if this was a blue-sky thing, or simply another avenue to look to for submissions. "Honestly, we're not very aggressive about publishing other people's games," he says. "The Developer Program is not at all about luring people in. Brian Fiete, our CTO and the author of the PopCap framework, just wanted to make these tools available to new developers."
The framework would give them "a leg up in getting started, so they might focus on creating cool new games, and not on refining technical stuff and chasing bugs." While he acknowledges it helps PopCap, he says that help is indirect, "by hopefully raising the quality bar for the whole casual games industry." Not all developers believe in their benign intentions, he says. "A fair number of developers are still suspicious of this and can't believe the PopCap framework doesn't have some sneaky catch built in, whereby they'll be beholden to us, or we'll have the rights to seize their game or something. But it really is pretty much free to use, with no obligations."
Aspiring developers should note, though: "We very rarely look at a submission if it's just in the idea stage. Ideas are a dime a dozen, really, and it's very hard to be able to tell if something in this vein will be fun, just by looking at a proposal. Try writing up a description of Tetris or Bejeweled, and show it to someone not familiar with the game. It's just incomprehensible." However, once games have reached the prototype stage, they're quite willing to look. "A number of our games are co-development efforts we've done with external people that started at this stage. Insaniquarium and Chuzzle, for instance. These were games that an external developer had gotten to a playable stage, which we thought we could help refine and polish, and then publish and market. It has to be something pretty amazing for us to pick [it] up, though, at least in potential. We're not likely to publish something that's just a derivative of one of our own titles."
